Bubble Motion has inked a new carrier deal in Japan for its BubbleBlog voice-blogging platform with KDDI Corp. (KDDIF). The service, which is particularly attractive in markets where voicemail isn’t fully developed, is in the midst of an aggressive rollout in Indonesia, Philippines, India and Japan.
CMO Brad Porteus, which describes the services as a “voice-based Twitter” or voicemail via SMS, said the company has primarily been focusing on markets where mobile is often the first and primary form of communication. The service, which works on any phone system via interactive voice response, has already reached more than 2 million users in India.
The company is pursuing two business models: carriers can charge a subscription fee to customers who want to follow “premium bloggers” such as movie stars and recording artists, or customers can use a more communal version of the services, which only requires them to pay for the airtime they use while retrieving the audio clips.
Bubble Motion now has more than 100 premium bloggers, Porteus said, and “we’re able to then share some of that content revenue with the bloggers themselves.”